PC/MAC CD- ROM. Notting Hill.1996. £29.95.

At the beginning of this CD, Richard Dawkins appears in his ‘study’, a 19th century curio collection filled with books, old skeletons, butterfly cabinets, giant stuffed birds, etc. From the fireplace, a whirling, gelatinous mass, vaguely reminiscent of the water creature in the movie “The Abyss”, issues forth and then materialises into Dawkins. He tells how the mystery of where we come from has been solved by Darwin’s ‘discovery’ of evolution and how the complexity of life can be boiled down to “copy yourself”.

Dawkins dematerialises and heads back up the chimney, inviting you to explore his study. A click on the photocopier lets you watch the photocopier make lots of baby photocopiers. Select a constant twirling DNA strand on a table and you will be introduced to DNA, with amazing video of a replicating DNA strand and of protein production, and allowed to play mutation games on miniature, rapidly growing bonsai trees. A poster on the wall is a segue into the ‘boxing match’, where the major concepts in the struggle of life (geometric expansion; finite resources; competition; and longevity, fidelity, and fecundity) are played out by little Mr. Potatohead- like creatures.

As you have probably guessed by now, this CD is “way cool”, “rad”, or whatever kids say these days. This CD has been designed to appeal to today’s information age youngsters. It’s filled with Dawkins’s sound bites, short video clips of dam-building beavers, and quick games where you get to kill off the brightly- coloured guppies in some South American river. A technological emphasis extends through many aspects of this CD, from the often-employed comparison between technology and life (how CD’s are like a moth’s wing and how water lilies inspired the Crystal Palace) to the suggestion that electronic ‘life’ would be defined by the ability for self- replication. Indeed, there is even an extra game supplied, Cybertation, which allows you to ‘mutate’ and ‘breed’ three- dimensional shapes, with the suggestion that you are creating your own electronic life. Even the structure of the CD would probably be incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with Windows and surfing the Internet.

The layout is meant to reflect a museum. After you leave Dawkins’s study, you enter the Evodrome, a circular structure which has different ‘exhibits’ on each of three different rings. The outer most ring has Dawkins’s study and the Debaters’ Corner, where Darwin, Lamark, Lyell, and Paley (a 19th century creationist) battle it out over topics such as the age of the earth and the nature of evolution. Paley is definitely the most eloquent of the lot, and I just can’t imagine Lyell saying, “Poppycocks”. Finally, the Taxonomists’ Corner contains short blurbs on taxonomy and cladistics and an end- of ­ the game quiz.

The middle ring contains 12 exhibits designed as slide shows. The topics covered almost perfected matched those covered in my school biology book’s evolution section, such as mutualism and predator and prey interactions, for which the examples given were also vaguely familiar, such as the rhino and the oxpecker and the cheetah and the gazelles. Each exhibit opens with a Dawkins sound bite and then allows you to move through short text and photos about the topics, often in a fairly lateral manner. Many of the pages of the slide shows have links to a database, which offers more in-depth text with no pictures, games, or gimmicks. The database allows further links with other topics and with a glossary.

The database makes this CD appropriate for slightly older children (say 14-15), but it has a few annoying flaws. First, the text is in an amazingly scruffy and tiny font, making it quite difficult to read at times. The glossary is particularly bad in this respect. Also, much of the text has been taken straight from Dawkins’s books. Consequently, one often reads, “As we saw in Chapter 6,” without having a clue what chapter 6 was all about.

The innermost ring has four exhibits. The Galapagos Islands, which allows you to observe the finches and tortoises, has great game- like graphics like children will love. The other three address two topics each, such as how mimics evolved, how sex evolved, how beauty evolved, and how complex design evolved. These topics are treated with small blocks of text with pictures and occasional bits of video and each one also has some sort of game or ‘hands-on’ activity associated with it. One of the best of these is on the evolution of the eye. This game allows the user to move the eye through the various steps from a group of light- sensitive cells to a fish eye as a picture of a shark comes into focus and a graph records that this takes only 1500 transformations.

The installation of the CD was fairly easy, but not as simple as the instructions would have you believe. The CD is also supposed to be Macintosh compatible, but RJA couldn’t install it on his Mac. Navigating around the Evodrome is extremely easy, even if you don’t read the instructions of the CD jacket.

I do have a few nits to pick. Dawkins treats the extinction of the dinosaurs as certainly being caused by an impact which killed the cold-blooded dinosaurs by throwing up dust and blocking the sunlight, without the slightest mention that there is still some controversy over this. He refers to Amphioxus as the ancestor of the vertebrates and describes it as having vertebrae, but no skull, which is not strictly accurate.

This CD is really not much use to a palaeontologist or even for undergraduates. All of the concepts covered are quitebasic. But if you can’t tell your Batesian from your Müllerian mimicry, maybe you should have a look at this. It is, nevertheless, really good fun and a great thing to play with on a Sunday afternoon. (It took me about 3 hours to get through everything.) This CD is really most appropriate for teenagers. Younger teens might not be quite up to the reading level required for the data base, and older teens studying for their A- levels in biology will find that they know it all already. The twelve to fourteen-year-olds, however, will love this. So if you know any kids, The Evolution of Life would make a spectacular gift.

Kim Freedman, Department of Geology, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH.